Google Assistance to make phone calls on your behalf!

Google’s Artificial Intelligence has taken things to the next level. Now Google Assistance will be able to make phone calls on your behalf in the background, it will have a proper conversation and book a reservation at a restaurant for example; isn’t that amazing.

Google Assistance to make phone calls on your behalf!

Google I/O meet, California

Google’s Artificial Intelligence has taken things to the next level. Now Google Assistance will be able to make phone calls on your behalf in the background, it will have a proper conversation and book a reservation at a restaurant for example; isn’t that amazing.

On May 9, Google presented this at the Google I/O meet, in California, USA. Google I/O brings together developers from around the globe for an immersive experience focused on exploring the next generation of tech.

The technology uses a natural speech pattern, which includes hesitations and affirmations such as “uh-huh”, making it almost indistinguishable from a genuine human phone call. The brand new feature will be launched for the public later this year.

The feature is also named as Google Duplex; Google Duplex works in the background and gives you a notification when it has arranged a booking for you. It calls the person using the Google Assistant voice, and is even able to insert pauses, grunts and "uh-huhs" in order to make the call recipient believe it's talking to a human.

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai in his keynote showed an example on stage that showed someone asking Google Assistant to call a hairdresser and make an appointment for a woman's haircut at 12PM.The Google Assistant then found the phone number, called the hairdressers and arranged the appointment without any extra interaction. The voice assistant could even handle extra requests such as a change in the time and difficult questions about what the person wanted.

In the example, Google suggested that the person on the end of the phone didn't know they were talking to a voice assistant either. In this restaurant booking scenario, Duplex successfully handled requests where meaning was open to interpretation, and navigated politely through a conversation with somewhat confused front of house restaurant stuff.

At the event, Sundar Pichai said,

“Google should find ways to reduce stress from technology and improve customers' digital well-being; we can't just be wide-eyed about the innovations technology creates.”

It's easy to think of the use cases for Duplex, but this technology could also be misused too and it'll be interesting to see how Google hopes to secure the feature in the future. It's bad enough getting a prank call from a human, let alone an AI.

According to Google, one of the key aspects was constraining Duplex to closed domains which are narrow enough to explore extensively. It’s only after rigorous training in such domains that Duplex can have natural conversations. It can’t have general discussions in the same way.

The tech may appear useful on the user’s part, but it sounds handier (and an example of AI taking human jobs) for the businesses which rely on phone calls for booking appointments. Every day they get numerous phone calls. If there is Google Assistant on the phone, it may be able to handle things more efficiently.

More from the event:

Google Maps will also start to make more dining suggestions by learning user habits and pinpointing their locations by using smart phone cameras to analyze surroundings.

The battery will now use machine learning to adapt to how you use apps in order to conserve energy. It will also have something called "adaptive brightness" that learns how bright a user likes their screen based on manual adjustments, instead of automatically adjusting based on the how bright it is in the environment.

Another feature called "shush" mode automatically turns on the "Do Not Disturb" function if someone turns their phone face down on a table. And "Wind Down Mode" will fade the screen to grayscale at a designated bed time to help users disconnect before bed.